"AirPair, a startup that offers live, online consultation with programming experts, is announcing today that it has partnered with more than a dozen companies. Those partnerships are supposed to connect people having difficulty using a certain API with others who can help...

Co-founder Jonathon Kresner told me that one of the main ways customers use AirPair is to get help integrating an API like Stripe’s. He argued that this is part of a larger trend that he described as “the API-ification of the web.” By making more services and integrations available via APIs, companies are “empowering people” by “lowering the bar for them to build useful things,” Kresner said, but this also creates its own technical challenges.

So AirPair has formalized its efforts in this area by partnering with the companies that built the APIs in question. Those companies can now identify experts in their larger developer communities, and if those experts are willing, AirPair can then connect them with users who need help with a specific API, and who are willing to pay for the experts’ time. AirPair’s initial partners include Algolia, TwoTap, TrueVault, Unbabel, Balanced, Evernote, Searchmetrics, Stripe, Keen IO, Twilio, Sendwithus, TokBox, Framed Data, SendGrid, Human API, Vero, the Echo Nest, and AdRoll."